Moving into a Client Services Role

Hi, I’m Victoria, and I rarely stop talking. My school reports regularly featured the sentence ‘bright, but needs to stop the chatter’ and I’m forever thankful for the unlimited minutes on my phone contract.

So starting my digital career, SEO was pretty much the last thing I thought I’d be doing post-graduation – 10 days after ‘pens down’ on my last exam, I began my role as an SEO Assistant, at a large performance marketing agency in Manchester and knuckled down on the quiet life.

To my surprise, SEO wasn’t always the quiet role I had originally thought – yes, there were a lot of spreadsheets, VLOOKUP formulas and exports from Keyword Planner… but there were infrequent bursts of client contact, and I relished the challenge of forging these new relationships, trying my best to charm clients at meetings and manage expectations via email.

A year went by, and I realised my strengths lay here – I desperately want to avoid the cliché “people person”, but I can’t think of a better way to describe it.

A lot of questions ran through my mind when deciding to move from Operations to Client Services – can I cope with the requests from clients? Am I able to nag the production teams and feel unpopular in the office for (possibly long) periods of time? Can I deal with the challenge of explaining different channels at one time? Coming from SEO, can I genuinely pay as much attention to the other channels?

From the moment I joined the Latitude White team in August 2016, client contact was bestowed upon me, and I began to build relationships between myself and our partners, right through to direct contact with some of our end users.

Starting out, this was really tough – because when I worked in SEO, I was of the opinion that Client Services could involve an element of “sugar coating” for clients.

Turns out this is not the case.

I’m an inherently honest person, sometimes to a fault – but it helps that one of the best things about working for Latitude is the agency’s honesty and transparency with clients.

Overall, moving from an operations role is both everything and nothing like I expected it to be – I talk all day (which I obviously love) but I’m sure there is somewhere in my brain that misses keyword research (…somewhere…).

My move to Latitude has been smooth and I have definitely benefited from the friendly environment, the coffee machine and the glorious tradition of beer o’clock on a Friday afternoon.